It was during Zia's regime (1977-89) that a network of
madrassas (religious schools) was established throughout the country. Initially, most of
these were funded by foreign aid from a variety of sources. These schools became the
training ground for a new religious 'scholar'.

Since boarding and lodging were free, it was not only
the children of poor Afghan refugees who flocked to receive this privileged and unique
instruction.

It’s no secret that the fundamentalists have penetrated the army on every level. And unlike the old-style religious groups, they want to seize state power.

Poor peasant families were only too happy to donate a son to the madrassas.
They thought it would be a mouth less to feed at home and the boy would be educated and
might find a job in the city or, if he was really lucky, in one of the Gulf states.

Together
with verses from the Koran (to be learnt by rote) and the necessity to lead a devout life,
these children were taught to banish all doubts. The only truth was divine truth and the
only code of conduct was that written in the Koran and the Hadiths. Virtue lay in
unthinking obedience. Anyone who rebels against the imam rebels against Allah. The aim was
clear. These madrassas had a single function. They were nurseries designed to produce
fanatics. The primers, for example, stated that the Urdu letter jeem stood for jihad; tay
for tope (cannon); kaaf for Kalashnikov and khay for khoon (blood).

As they grew older they were instructed in
the use of sophisticated hand weapons and taught how to make and plant bombs. ISI agents
provided training and supervision. They could also observe the development of the more
promising students or the Taliban, who were later picked out and sent for more specialised
training at secret army camps, the better to fight the 'holy war' against the
unbelievers in Afghanistan.

Pakistan's oldest Islamic party, the
Jamaat-i-Islami, had grown in influence during the Zia years.

"Pakistan was the condom the US needed to enter Afghanistan. We’ve served our purpose and...can be just flushed down the toilet," says a retired general.

Its leaders assumed that
they would run the schools. The party has always prided itself on its cadre organisation
built on the underground 'Leninist model' of small cells. It shunned mass
membership, but this may have been because it, in turn, was shunned by the masses. Its
leaders now thought their time had come. They saw the students as potential recruits. They
were to be disappointed. New problems arose. Since dollars were freely available,
different Islamic factions emerged and began to compete with each other for mastery in
these schools and a division of the spoils. The ISI became the arbiter of intra-religious
disputes and favoured some groups against others.

For
a time the Afghan war consumed their energies. After the first war was over, the Pakistani
state refused to accept a coalition government in Afghanistan. It was Benazir
Bhutto's government that unleashed the Taliban, backed by Pakistan army commando
units, in an attempt to take Kabul. The US, fearful of Iranian influence in the region,
had backed this decision.

The dragon seeds sown in 2,500 madrassas produced a
crop of 225,000 fanatics ready to kill and ready to die for their faith when ordered to do
so by their religious leaders.

An EU-style South Asian confederation of republics should make it perfectly possible for both India and Pakistan to guarantee an autonomous Kashmir.

Gen Naseerullah Babar, Benazirs minister for the
interior, confided to friends that since the Taliban were becoming a menace inside
Pakistan, he had decided that the only solution to the problem lay in giving the
extremists their own country. This argument was disingenuous at the time, but in the light
of what has happened over the last two years, Babar deserves to be tried as a
war-criminal.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
Cold War came to an end, leaving behind orphan-states on every continent. The effect in
Pakistan was catastrophic. The fundamentalist groups had served their purpose and,
unsurprisingly, the US no longer felt the need to supply them with funds and weaponry.
Overnight, the latter became violently anti-American and began to dream of revenge.
Pakistans political and military leaders, who had served the US loyally and
continuously from 1951 onwards, felt humiliated by Washingtons indifference. A
retired General summed it up succinctly for my benefit: "Pakistan was the condom the
Americans needed to enter Afghanistan. Weve served our purpose and they think we can
be just flushed down the toilet."

The Pakistan army-one of the Pentagons spoilt
brats in Asia-refused to be relegated to the status of Kuwait. In order to gain attention
it threw a nuclear tantrum. The explosion has had the desired effect. Pakistan is back on
the B list of countries in the US state department. On 29 November 1998, the
then foreign minister, Sartaj Aziz, attempted to soothe Western opinion: "I see no
possibility of an accidental nuclear war between Pakistan and India. Pakistan has an
effective control and command system". This is pure nonsense on a scientific level,
but even if one were to accept the statement, a political question is immediately posed.
What if reality began to imitate our nightmares and the Taliban took over the Pakistani
Army? Every political leader in Pakistan is aware of the danger. Nawaz Sharif attempted to
pre-empt political Islam by stealing some of its clothes, but this is a tactic that rarely
works and is usually a mark of desperation.

The irony of the present situation is that religion in the
Punjab always was a relaxed affair. The old tradition of Sufi mysticism, with its emphasis
on individual communion with the Creator and its hostility to preachers, had found deep
roots in the countryside. The tombs of the old Sufi saints, for centuries the site of
annual festivals during which the participants sang, danced, drank, inhaled bhang and
fornicated to their hearts content, were placed under martial law by General Zia.
The people were to be denied simple pleasures.

THE peculiarly non-Punjabi form of religious extremism did
not arrive in Pakistan from nowhere. It was approved by Washington, funded by Saudi
petrodollars and carefully nourished by Zia. The result was the birth of madness. The
twisted and self-destructive character of the groups that have been mushrooming over the
last five years is hardly in doubt. Ninety per cent of Pakistans Muslims are Sunnis.
The rest are mainly Shias. The Sunnis themselves are divided into two major schools of
thought. The Deobandis represent orthodoxy. The Barelvis believe in a more synthetic
Islam, defined and changed by local conditions. For many years these were literary
disputes, often debated in public by mullahs and religious scholars. No longer. Every
faction now lays claim to Islam, a moral and political claim. Disputes are no longer
settled through discussion, but are resolved by machine-guns and massacres.

Some Deobandi factions want the Shias to be declared as
heretics and, preferably, physically exterminated. A sectarian civil war has been raging
for nearly three years. The Sunni group Sipah-e-Sahaba (Soldiers of the First Four
Caliphs) has attacked Shia mosques in the heart of Lahore and massacred the Shia faithful
at prayer. The Shias have responded in kind. They formed the Sipah-e-Mohammed (Soldiers of
Mohammed), got Iranian backing and began to exact a gruesome revenge. Several hundred
people have died in these intra-Muslim massacres, mainly Shias.

In January this year, an armed Taliban faction seized a
whole group of villages in the Hangu district of Pakistans North West Frontier
Province. They declared the area to be under Islamic laws and promptly
proceeded to organise the public destruction of TV sets and dish antennae in the village
of Zargari. This was followed by the burning of 3,000 obscene video and audio
cassettes in the small square in Lukki.

There is something slightly comical in this hostility to
television and it reminds one of a situationist spectacle in the sixties, but humour,
alas, is not something associated with the Taliban. A leader of the movement, Hussain
Jalali, wants to extend the Afghan experience to Pakistan. After the television burning,
he declared: "The hands and feet of thieves will be chopped off and all criminals
brought to justice in accordance with Islamic laws."

"What can we do?" a supporter of the Sharif
brothers had asked me, wringing his hands in despair. "These bastards are all
armed!" I pointed out that some of the bastards were being armed by the government to
create mayhem in neighbouring Kashmir, but that Pakistans bloated army was also
armed. Why werent they asked to disarm these groups? Here the conversation ended.
For it is no secret that the fundamentalists have penetrated the army on every level. What
distinguishes them from the old-style religious groups is that they want to seize state
power and for that they need the army.

In fact one of the most virulent of the groups, the
Lashkar-e-Toiba, is a creation of the ISI. Its political wing, Ahle-Hadis, wants the Saudi
model implanted in Pakistan, but without the monarchy. They have supporters and mosques
throughout the world, including Britain and the US, whose aim is to supply cadres and
money for the worldwide jehad. The Ahle-Hadis is the most orthodox of the Sunni sects and
is in a minority except that it has powerful supporters-government ministers grace its
meetings. Their sub-office is at 5 Chamberlaine Road in Lahore. I was tempted to go and
interview them, but the sight of thirty heavily-armed guards persuaded me against the
venture.

The groups armed wing, Lashkar-e-Toiba (Soldiers of
Medina), couldnt exist without the patronage of the army. It has a membership of
50,000 militants and is the leading group in the jehad to liberate Indian
Kashmir. They are trained by the army at eight special camps in Azad
(Pakistani-controlled) Kashmir and are funded by Saudi Arabia and the government of
Pakistan. They recruit teenagers from poor families for the holy war. They have lost
several hundred members in Kashmir. The government pays them fifty thousand rupees for
each corpse returned from Kashmir. While fifteen thousand rupees are paid to the family of
the martyr, the rest helps to fund the organisation.

The Harkat-ul-Ansar (Volunteers Movement), once funded by
the US and backed by the ISI, was declared a terrorist organisation by the state
department last year. It promptly changed its name to Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. Its fighters
were amongst the most dedicated Taliban and it has shifted its training camps from the
Punjab to Afghanistan. The Saudi terrorist, Osama Bin Laden, continues to maintain close
contacts with the ISI and his supporters have warned the government that any attempt to
abduct him or ban his organisation would lead to an immediate civil war in Pakistan. They
boast that the army will never agree to be used against them. Why? Because there has been
a symbiosis of sorts. There are too many of their supporters in the army and on every
level.

Both these groups want to take over Pakistan. They dream of
an Islamic Federation which will impose a Pax-Talibana stretching from Lahore to
Samarkand, but avoiding the Heretic Republic of Iran. For all their
incoherence and senseless rage, their message is attractive to those layers of the
population who yearn for some order in their lives. If the fanatics promise to feed them
and educate their children, they are prepared to forego the delights of CNN and BBC World.
It is this prospect that is truly frightening.

The only other alternative is to mend the breach with
India. The 1998 visit of the Indian prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, to Lahore was
welcomed by business interests and an otherwise critical print media. There is a great
deal of talk of a new permanent settlement. An EU-style arrangement that incorporates
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. An opening of the frontiers and a no-war pact
between India and Pakistan. It is undoubtedly the most rational solution on offer, but it
would necessitate the disarming of, at least, the Lashkar-e-Toiba. During his visit, the
Indian prime minister had demanded this as a gesture of goodwill.

When a leader of the group was informed of this request by
a Pakistani official, he replied: "Try and disarm us, if you can. If you do, we will
have to do now what we were planning to do in two years time. Its up to
you." It is this desire for a head-on clash, this urge towards an explosive
encounter, even if they turn out to be the victims of such an encounter, that marks the
new wave of Islamic militants in Pakistan. Mercifully, they still constitute a minority in
the country, but all that could change if nothing else changes.

Has anything really changed with the coup of October 12,
1999? Most of the liberal intelligentsia, disillusioned with traditional political

alternatives and too exhausted to act themselves, were
hopeful that Musharraf would modernise the structure, but the underlying problems refuse
to go away. Good intentions alone cannot change Pakistan. The problem posed by the
existence of armed fundamentalist organisations cannot be solved by adopting an ostrich
pose.

The army is no longer a unified institution. Well-organised
groups of Islamic zealots have penetrated its core. Unlike the older and more traditional
religious parties, the Sipah-e-Sahaba, the Sipah-e-Mohammed, the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen are all hungry for power. Their preferred model is that of the
Taliban. If such a faction were ever to take over the Pakistani army-and the possibility
is not as remote as it seemed a few years ago-the possession of nuclear weapons would
acquire a frightening new significance.

That, too, will achieve little, for the only serious and
rational alternative to domestic chaos is a long-term Treaty of Friendship and Trade with
India, a new permanent settlement which could form the basis of a larger EU-style
confederation of South Asian Republics. Within such a framework the Kashmir question, too,
could be amicably resolved. After all, it should be perfectly possible for both India and
Pakistan to guarantee an autonomous Kashmir

within such a confederation. In fact, Kashmir could become
a haven of peace, symbolising a new peaceful co-existence. If the political will existed
in Delhi and ghq in Rawalpindi, what I am suggesting is perfectly achievable.

For over fifty years, Pakistan has turned its back on
India, imagining it could replace its giant neighbour by cultivating links with the Gulf
states and Saudi Arabia. (The only exception was in 1961 when Ayub Khan, under US
influence, offered a joint defence pact to India. Nehru retorted: "Joint defence
against whom?" The answer came a year later on the Sino-Indian border. Interestingly
enough, the joint defence proposal aroused very little protest in Pakistan itself!) The
strategy has been a political and economic failure, leaving the country denuded of a
skilled labour-force and incapable of meeting its own basic needs. In recent years, there
were a few signs that politicians of the main secular parties were beginning to explore a
new economic deal with India. Pressure from the fundamentalists and the army sent their
heads quickly back into the sand. And yet this remains the only rational solution in the
medium term. All other options are bleak beyond belief.

The ISI-armed fundamentalists are waiting in the wings. The
hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane and the release of a fundamentalist leader was
merely a symptom of the dangers that lurk underneath the surface of Pakistans social
fabric. Previous civilian governments could not guarantee law and order outside a few
cities.

If you wish your letter to be considered for publication in the print magazine, we request you to use a proper name, with full postal address - you could still maintain your anonymity, but please desist from using unpublishable sobriquets and handles

Of God and MenIn the extracts Dreaming the Pax-Talibana Nightmare (February 14), Tariq Ali says: "Virtue lay in unthinking obedience. Anyone who rebels against the Imam rebels against Allah." Does this mean the Imam assumes the role of Allah and demands ‘unthinking’ loyalty from the faithful? But unlimited powers for the Imam are likely to be misused and are misused. Islam’s considered to be a religion of peace, theoretically. But thanks to the interpretations of these imams, it’s taken to be a religion of terrorism! Parjan Kumar Jain,Delhi

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